Archive for category: Graphic Design

An illustration I created for Jack and Jill magazine for their “Pen in Hand” department while I worked as their art director. This was a reader-submitted story that we illustrated and published in the November/December 2013 issue.

One of the requirements was to incorporate some kind of activity into the illustration. For this one, we asked that the reader find the six hidden hockey stick shapes within the illustration. Can you find them?

The creative process differs somewhat from artist to artist, but here is an example of mine. I’ve chosen the story of Little Red Riding Hood to work with to demonstrate my abilities in conveying narrative, action, emotion, and consistent character development in my illustrations.

These are different from some of my other sketches as these have been created digitally in Adobe Photoshop. So far, I think I like the digital process in my sketch work. I notice that as I go along, the sketches are getting tighter and tighter. That is fine for me for now as I don’t answer to a client on this one. Generally, of course, I would submit rougher sketches, much like the second image with Red and the wolf in the woods. I would get approval on that before moving forward with tighter sketches.

The VERY rough sketch below is an example of the first step in my creative process, using traditional pencil and paper. I scribble out these just to get a basic idea of what I might want the characters to look like and what scenes I might want to include. These are so rough that they would never be seen by a client.

I just finished this editorial illustration for “Life+Dog Magazine.” I created this in what I call my Vectoresque style. I’ve been told (and I agree) that this would be a solid style for the toy and game industry. Hopefully, I can get a foot in the door there sometime soon.

The editor wanted something light and fun for this piece. This particular project was created as a lead-in illustration for a feature article. The article discusses fifty dogs, six of whom are illustrated here, who are “changing the world.” So these illustrations represent real pets belonging to real people. It was a bit challenging to get the Golden Retrievers to look different enough to be recognizable as two separate individuals, and some of the photos weren’t great to work from, but all-in-all, I think it turned out well.

Here is the sketch as well. You can see that the order of the dogs got shifted around a bit, as well as some of the wording. But that is the nature of the business.

Just dropping a little note with a rough sketch attached to introduce my next project. Just a Thanksgiving-themed John Deere promotional illustration. I will be creating this piece in the “Celestial” style.

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks establishing a new web presence for my illustration portfolio. It’s been a real challenge as I started with a Prosite website hosted with Behance, but then realized that I needed more flexibility with my site than what they offered. It’s a real shame too because Behance does do a lot of things really well, and they make creating a nice web presence pretty simple.

Why use Behance?

Free version

There is a free version of Behance as well as a paid, professional version called Prosite. I used both of these formats because, frankly, you don’t really have a choice. Your profile in the free version of the Behance community (and a community is what it is) is where you need to upload and organize all of your portfolio items. From there, you can publish them to your Prosite website, or you can go ahead and enter your professional site and pull the items in from there.

So basically, your default profile in Behance is sort of like a control area. Any changes that you make to your portfolio items there will automatically update in your professional site. The default free Behance presence looks something like this:

This free version isn’t a bad deal at all. Uploading and displaying high resolution artwork is a breeze, and so is the organization of your work. You can choose the cover images for your projects, and you can create customized, cropped thumbnails for those covers, all within the Behance framework. The system also automates the metadata, tagging, and categories for each of your entries, which is great for optimizing your content for the web (although I found it a little annoying that I had to make an entry in every input field, even if I didn’t want to).

The Behance Community

I admit that I didn’t really delve into the community aspect of what Behance offered as much as I probably should have. But I do plan to keep my Behance free profile posted and updated, and I plan to get more involved in the community a little later. But the bottom line is that it works kind of like a merger of LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow, like (appreciate), and comment on other artist’s artwork. You can fill out a form that will post a nice resume for you, and there is a job bank where you can try to find work. For employers or art directors, this is an obvious place to visit to look for artists, designers, and illustrators. For most artists, this is a huge plus.

Another great feature that Behance ffers is that you can also buy and sell your artwork, and Behance makes that a very simple process. They will simply include a purchase button in the corner of any of the displayed artwork that you’d like to sell. The company that they partner with will handle printing, packaging, and all of the invoicing and collecting of monies for for all the work you sell, if you want them to. If you want to handle all of that yourself, you can do that too.

As far as porfolio display goes, Behance does a great job. I was even able to find a way to display multi-page publications and books that I usually find so hard to display well online. Behance partners with ISSUU to simplify that process, and your pdf files are turned into animated, page-turning slide shows. You can see what that looks like for this Medikin children’s book that I illustrated. Just click the link or the image below to interact with the actual slideshow. You do have to set up an ISSUU account, but I found the service worthwhile.

Why use Prosite (Behance professional paid version)?

Prosite is the paid, professional version of a Behance online presence. This package offers you a whole new way to customize your presence, and a lot of artists do it a lot of different ways. When I tried this out, I thought this was really going to be the ticket for me!

Prosite features

custom domain

custom logo and favicon

add multiple pages

import your blog from several blogging sites.

add a feature image as a website header

control spacing, margins, rules, order of images, and many other design elements with easy to use modules

With all of this, I was able to put together what I thought was a quite nice looking portfolio. You can see that below.

So, what more could I ask for? Right?

Why don’t I don’t use Behance Prosite?

I spent a lot of time setting up my Prosite just the way I wanted it, and I even illustrated a custom header to fit nicely into the space provided. I thought I was all set—until I realized two simple limitations that turned out to be “make or break” items for me.

Features Prosite lacks:

sub-pages/nested pages

ability to create a different feature image or “header” for each page

I work in a few different illustration styles and offer services other than illustration, so it was important for me not to have to display all the different illustration styles together. My site would have just looked too cluttered. Prosite worked great for displaying a single illustration style, as you can see above, but beyond that, I was stuck.

Is Behance right for you?

It depends. If you work primarily in one style, it could work out very well for you. If you work in more than one style and would like to have feature images to promote each of those, it’s not going to work out. I suspect that a large majority of illustrators, artists, and designers will do quite well in the Behance/Prosite arena. It just didn’t happen to work for me. Sometime in the near future, I’ll talk about what did.

I just received some magazine samples from Life and Dog magazine in the mail. I did a couple of illustrations for this client. Here they are:

These magazine shots are not great photos (taken with my phone), but the magazine itself looks GREAT with nice quality paper and printing. So pleased with this. Sounds like I’ll be getting a bit more work from this magazine.

Well, I finally finished the painting that I tried to work on in Painter 12. I tried and tried to work with it, but the lags and crashes were just too much for me to deal with. I ended up bringing everything in into Adobe Photoshop CS6 to finish this piece.

I think I finally have a system for working in this style in Photoshop. It took developing several custom brushes and working in multiple, multiple layers. But I did get it done. This one is titled “Sun, Moon, Stars.” It is really just a self-promotional piece. The original is 11 x 17 inches. I reduced it and used it as the header image on my website. www.amandascreativestudios.com if you want to check it out.

I intend to do the next one with Thanksgiving motif. I had a sketch all worked out for Halloween, but that Holiday sort of sneaked up on me in a hurry! 🙂 Maybe next year.

Until now, I have been using Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, or traditional artist media to create all of my illustrations. But for commercial work, I much prefer to work digital…for the Control Z function if nothing else. That one key stroke has revolutionized the world of art!

Photoshop and Illustrator, however, as great as they are, don’t quite “get it” for the watercolor artist, and so I ordered my copy of Painter 12 with its all new “real watercolor” world, and I have been chomping at the bit to get started–but I was a little concerned. I had previously ordered Painter X and had tried using it, but I had so many crashes and freezes with both the Macintosh and IBM versions that I gave up on it in extreme frustration. I never touched it again. When deadlines loom, working with something reliable is paramount.

With the release of Painter 12, I assumed whatever the problem had been before had surely been fixed by now. I was wrong.

The software held up fairly well throughout the low resolution tutorials that I worked on, although it did still freeze up a couple of times. But the real problems started when I tried to work in high resolution, on real-world art.

All I can say is “what a drag!”

THE SYMPTOMS

Freezing up. Crashing. Hanging up. Locking up. All those nice things.

I could barely proceed in any direction with any brush on the canvas without a crash. Again, I became so frustrated that I was tempted to give it up forever. But I couldn’t justify throwing in the towel after having spent so much money–twice.

I scanned internet forums and articles and found some possible fixes. Here’s what I tried…and what failed (I thought):

Go to Edit > Preferences > Performance > Multicore Usage, and lower the number of cores to match your system, you may even need to set it a little lower.

Adjust the brush tips. Make sure the “Enhanced brush ghost” is NOT selected. That can cause performance lags in some brushes.

I tried all these fixes, but to no avail. I shot Corel a rather curt email about my issues.

I admit that I initially received two pretty quick responses. They instructed me to run several reports about my system and forward those to them, which I did. That was two days ago, and I haven’t heard back.

THE FIX (sort of)

In the mean time, my impatience got the better of me, and I experimented a little more. I found that after I set the preferences that I mentioned above, they weren’t applying to any new documents that I opened, and I was still using the default settings without realizing it. I should have remembered that in order to make global preference changes that affect all future documents, you need to adjust the settings before you open any document. Otherwise the adjustments just apply to that document. Once I figured that out and made the aforementioned adjustments with no documents opened, things got better, but they aren’t perfect by a long shot.

MY TAKE (so far, until I hear back from Corel)

The real watercolor brushes are laggy, to say the least. They look good, but they try my patience to use. Certainly not like using Photoshop. They don’t act exactly like real watercolors either, but with some tweaking they can look like the real thing, and that’s what counts. So I’m pretty pleased with that.

I still experience lock-ups and crashes fairly regularly, but I can at least make some progress with my paintings before that happens. So save often and save early!

I like how the painting is turning out. I enjoy the feel of the brushes and feel they are more intuitive than Photoshop brushes. I’m working a little slowly since I’m still on this learning curve, but I’m learning quicker ways to get the same look accomplished, and I’m sure that that will only improve with time and practice.

I hope this helps anyone having the same kind of hang-ups in Painter 12. I’ll be posting my first digital watercolor painting in the next couple of days.

Per my last post, you know that I have made the tough decision to focus my career on illustration. But I still have more decisions to make. I still need to cut some clutter.

My current portfolio represents several different illustration styles and techniques that I have worked in over the years. I need to narrow that selection down to two at most, maybe even just one, although I’m not sure I can manage that. I may develop “style-fatigue.” I do need variety in my world 🙂

If I do fully develop two styles, I’m aware that I may need to work in one style under an alias. So I’ve also been considering how to implement that strategy in my marketing and web presence, etc. But that will all come later.

In any case, after several days of turning the matter over in my mind, I’ve decided to try working with two styles that are quite different. Here are samples of each:

Watercolor (style #1)

This is one style I’ll be developing. It will be more whimsical and loose. Done in watercolor technique.

Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop (style #2)

The above style is based on vector art created in Adobe Illustrator and then polished in Adobe Photoshop. It’s a tighter style and would be good for commercial art in the toy and game industry, for instance. I will post on my progress as I begin to build and develop portfolios in these styles.

This has been a tough decision for me as I love experimenting with different styles, mediums, and techniques, but it’s also important for me to make my artwork more marketable.

What art directors are looking for

Art directors often want to see consistency in style. They need to know what they can expect out of an artist and out of a contract. The only way to do that is to present work that is consistent in both quality and style.

For the next several weeks, my goal will be to crank out as much good artwork as possible in each of these styles.

I’ve been working in the graphic design field for over fifteen years now, and after all this time, and all that experience, there’s one question I still have a hard time answering…

“What IS it that I really want to do?”

I’ve done a little bit of every thing in this field.

I’ve worked for catalog companies, print shops, and an advertising agency. I’ve also freelanced and taught a high school graphic design program. I’ve designed for print and web, illustrated two children’s books and multiple other projects, and I have even done quite a bit of copywriting.

And I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.

But I have been advised that it has come time to make a decision. I HAVE to pick a direction. Stick to one thing, at least if I want to be truly successful in any one capacity.

And I know that’s true.

But cutting out any one creative outlet feels like cutting off my right arm. I thrive on novelty and change.

Be that as it may, I’ve decided that illustration is where my future needs to be, and so I will invest all the time and energy I can into streamlining my illustration style and a building a solid and more marketable portfolio. I’m determined to buckle down and get focused.

And I will.

But in the mean time, I also have to pay the bills. Which means I have to do the jobs handed to me. So I can’t cut out everything else. At least not yet.

But I would like to invite you, if you are interested, to follow along in my new adventure. I will share my struggles and frustrations as well as my successes, and post my work along the way as I work toward these goals.